“You don’t ice a cake before you’ve made the cake”

(On Community) we did this thing (we called) ‘spit drafting’, which was basically (that) you’re writing a script, you have the outline, you know what’s supposed to happen in the scene, but you’re having a hard time actually writing out those scenes, you’re having a hard time getting the jokes…

So instead of writing dialogue, you type it out and say… ‘I am in a fight with you right now’… ‘I have a response to you fighting’… ‘Well, I think you’re a jerk because you wanted to eat a pastrami sandwich and I didn’t.’ You’re getting the shape of the scene and you’d write it about to the length of how much that scene would take up in your script.

Sounds like a fun way of breaking through first draft paralysis. Also, Ganz admits that the Community writers used to swear in their spit drafts ‘like crazy’, which sounds fun too.

Hand-coded in HTML5 and CSS3 on an Apple Macintosh using Sublime Text 2. Type set in Franklin Gothic and served by Typekit. Colophon embellishment (‘Manticore’) from The History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents and Insects (1607) by Edward Topsell. Icons by IcoMoon.